Ms. Mottaz's Class: A Full Week Full of Learning!

It was SO nice to have a full week this week, and all the days were full of learning!

Student Banner!

The kiddos were so EXCITED to see the banner hung this week! Thank you for taking the time to make your child's banner. It is so neat to be able to see each child's personality or interests displayed in our classroom.

Read Week is Next Week!

We are super excited to celebrate Read Week next week! As a reminder there are dress-up days each day next week (a flyer is also coming home in your child's Friday Folder). As a reminder, if you (or a family member or friend) would like to come in and read to our class we would LOVE to have you! The kiddos always love to have a special guest come during this week and this is an opportunity for you to share your love of reading! We still have several open slots on Thursday - so if you are interested you can click here to sign up. We are looking forward to an amazing Read Week!

With Read Week being next week, we are not going to have homework that the students have return. Please continue to encourage your child to read.

What We Are Learning About:

Math: This week, we finished up Unit 6 by taking our end of the unit assessment. This test will be coming home next week. Please remember to review this test with your child, sign on the line, and return to school. By signing and returning, this just allows us to know that you have seen the test. Today we started Unit 7. The big focus of this unit is measurement. Coming home in your child's Friday Folder is a Family Letter that tells more about this unit.
Writing: Our Which is Better writing is coming right along! The students have finished researching their two topics, and we have begun writing our rough draft. This piece of writing is a lot less teacher guided. The students will have a graphic organizer to help them with their compose their writing.
Reading: This week, we have finished up talking about main idea within both nonfiction and fictional texts. Next week, we will start to have a conversation of the theme of fictional texts. We have also been talking about the why an author wrote a book or what was the author wanting to teach us.
Word Study: We continued to focus on long i vowel patterns this week. We learned that "igh" makes the long i sound. We also discovered that the long i sound can be found in words that have VCC (example: child). We will not have a new word study concept next week, but, the following week, we will be starting r-influenced words (ar, ir, or & ur).
Science: We started our geography unit on Monday. We started off by talking about what our ultimate goal of learning was for this unit. We introduced a proficiency scale to the students (picture below). We talked about that the learning target was a level three and discussed what we would be working on. In our conversation, we listed out specific things that we will be learning about during this unit. We discovered that we will be learning about water on Earth. In this unit, we will be learning about: 1) maps and identifying where the water is on the map, 2) where water is fresh water or salt water, 3) where water is likely to be warm or cold, and 4) where water is likely to be solid or liquid. We will continue to have great discussions about geography throughout the next few weeks!

Pretzel Class

What better way to learn about the importance of eating whole wheat than to have a pretzel class! CPS Nutrition Services gave us the opportunity to learn through our bellies on Monday! :) We learned about the importance of eating whole wheat flour because whole wheat flour includes the germ (we talked about this being the good type of germ) and bran. The germ and bran have a lot of the good nutrients that are found in the wheat plant. We also discovered that on grain and flour products we should be looking for yellow whole grain stamp. After our lesson, we each got a section of pretzel dough and then we made a pretzel. Our pretzels were cooked and then we had an opportunity to enjoy them. They were yummy! :)

2nd Trimester Pizza Party

The kiddos enjoyed their pizza party lunch celebration today! We worked a little longer this morning, but had an extended lunch this afternoon. Thank you for your donation earlier this year to make this pizza party a success, and an extra thank you for families who donated chips, vegetables and dessert today to make the lunch a success!

Extra Pictures :)

Below are pictures of the kiddos at their Math Exploration Stations on Monday and playing math games on Wednesday. We also got to visit Mrs. Kobermann's classroom to view their Ecosystem Projects - the kiddos enjoyed getting to see what they will get to do next year!